African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Clothing and dress. Social aspects. South Africa

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    You need only one bull to cover fifty cows: Zulu women and 'traditional' dress
    (1987-06) Klopper, Sandra
    This paper tries to place the contemporary dress of married Zulu women into a broad historical framework. It therefore addresses the the problem of why, despite radical economic and political transformations, some of the present conventions of female dress have remained virtually unchanged since Shakan times.(1) By looking particularly at the history of the institution of marriage, it attempts to demonstrate how the meanings ascribed to, but also the roles of these conventions have been affected by the codification of so-called customary law and the growth of migrant labour. Given the paucity of information on past perceptions and interpretations of female dress it must be pointed out, though, that many of the observations which follow are necessarily speculative.
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    "I dress in this fashion": women, the life-cycle, and the idea of SeSotho
    (1992-09-21) James, Deborah
    Anthropologists have become interested in "the colonisation of consciousness", and in the processes by which this colonization has been withstood. While some scholars have examined acts of resistance whose social and political effects were more easily measured, a longstanding concern of anthropologists has been the subtler means of defying domination, often through the reassertion of apparently traditional cultural forms, with effects sometimes perceptible no more widely than within local communities themselves.